


the death of myth-making

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [256]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dubious Morality, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Logistics, Mithrim, Not quite a non-linear narrative, Unreliable Narrator, but a very self-focused narrative, metalwork, title shared with a Plath poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24974989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: The state of affairs in Mithrim’s dank winter interior, heavy with the mingled scent and fog of straw and smoke, was this: Maedhros was awake. Awake, but fitfully so, like a child. A colicky infant, perhaps, restless and aware, not to be visited by many people. At least, Curufin thought this true, though his truth did not matter very much, when the infant’s acolytes flooded in to worship by twos and threes.
Relationships: Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Curufin | Curufinwë, Curufin | Curufinwë & Fëanor | Curufinwë, Curufin | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Curufin | Curufinwë & Turgon of Gondolin, Curufin | Curufinwë/Original Female Character(s), Fëanor | Curufinwë & Sons of Fëanor
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [256]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	the death of myth-making

There were three and a half hours left of daylight. As a practical matter, the afternoon was the best time for outdoor work. Curufin did not feel needed in the fort, then, and he measured his days in terms of need.

Not so much what _he_ needed. Not so much of him in any of it, save the mine.

The state of affairs in Mithrim’s dank winter interior, heavy with the mingled scent and fog of straw and smoke, was this: Maedhros was awake. Awake, but fitfully so, like a child. A colicky infant, perhaps, restless and aware, not to be visited by many people. At least, Curufin thought this true, though his truth did not matter very much, when the infant’s acolytes flooded in to worship by twos and threes.

 _Two animals of every kind_ , said Athair. He had told Curufin stories, changing them when they called for change. Curufin learned to do the same. Together, they made the Bible a greater work. They made language itself a greater work. They always asked _why_ —one asked the other, and the other answered.

His coat, which he fastened against the nip of smokeless air, was old and patched. He could have a new one, if he asked. He had been…close to asking, for that sort of thing, but the prospect had become alienating. As loathsome as slime, in fact. He still felt dirty, and he hated feeling dirty, unless it was needed.

Some time in the night, Curufin had lit a candle. He had been caught between raw panic and whole-body silence. He had found a pen, ink, paper. He then wrote a line of symbols, which only he could read.

Celegorm was waiting for his dog without saying that he was waiting for his dog. He had been doing this for some time, so at last he said,

“You look different.”

Candlelight. Of course. But—

_It wasn’t for you._

Curufin had only shrugged, conscious of the itch in his fingers. A reflex; a sign of self-doubt. He had wanted to reach up and smooth back the newly shorn hair, just as he wanted to ask if it made him look older. But, as his thoughts reminded him, he had not asked Nora for her services for Celegorm’s sake. It was for everyone else, that he had wanted to fit his father’s young face with something of his father’s old neatness, from when they lived a world away.

Without telling his brother any of this, he had continued to write his father’s words. He heard his own voice saying,

“You should sleep. We’ll need your strength.”

Celegorm _could_ be clever when he wanted to be. He said, in answer—

“ _You_ should sleep. We’ll need your wits.”

Afternoon. The gated barricade concealed the fort as a home; indeed it rigged it with a battlement. Curufin was, though on the whole appreciative of its might, less interested in that close-fitted barrier. It did nothing to protect the stables, or the smithy, both of which were outside its narrow reach.

When they had first arrived—and it was, it _was_ nearly a year ago now—they had set to work fairly quickly, quarrying for suitable rocks up and down the brows of the unforgiving hillocks to the north and west, treating them like pieces to be crafted into a stalwart mosaic. Athair did nothing by halves, except…when he did. The need had driven him away from his work, and death had driven him from need.

(Not Curufin’s need.)

At the low wall, now, he dropped his hand to the petrified flesh of the uppermost stone. The skin of hands grew older with time, but their size changed very slowly after the first sprouting of youth. If he squinted, he could see his father’s hand in his own, and not on the stone, but on the swept bench of the forge. The faint burns wrote themselves in the same smooth patterns on his fingers as on Athair’s.

Even Athair could not demarcate a perfect line between himself and the fire.

With Fingolfin come, with Fingon and Turgon and Finrod come, he felt new eyes looking on this legacy. On him: more than a legacy, a mirror. _You look different_ , Celegorm had said, and then, _You look—_

Silence was a word, from Celegorm. Silence was a name.

_You look like him. She cut off your curls and made you a man this is childhood again this is something we never learned but which we understood by dying half-deaths and carrying, carrying—_

The memories of Athair. Raw panic, out here. Curufin left the wall, uneasy over the new eyes; uneasy because Maedhros’ body had been carried through the gap in it, festering with threats that had been at rest in the hills for months. When Celegorm survived the poisoned dagger, when Ulfang at last lay dead, Curufin had felt an empty sense of purpose that reminded him of the mine. One didn’t have to feel whole _there_ —one didn’t have to feel embraced by the recesses and shapes and shadows of the place. One _was_ the wholeness, the thing that filled the emptiness.

At the forge, some of the shadows winked. Was it irony or destiny, or again, Athair, who had whispered to him of throwing stars? They hadn’t had any, to share jealously between him and his brothers, since Utumno burned.

Curufin liked blades that did not change; that were cunning enough to do their work _without_ change. Athair had been fascinated by folding knives and elaborate disguises, and of course, he acknowledged that the importance of knowing how those should be made, just as he knew the placement and trigger of each explosive at Mithrim’s less guarded borders. He documented every scrap of weaponry, his and Athair’s, in Tengwar.

(Secrecy, in the face of betrayal or invasion.)

He had to clear his mind of hatred, temporarily, if any proper blades were to be formed. Overheating the steel (which wasn’t plentiful) caused it to grain too coarsely. Useless. He called so many things, useless, even when they could be mended and remade.

Three stars were cooling before he stepped out to observe what light remained. Down the slope of the hill—the smithy was huddled above the stables, below the garden plots tucked against the fort’s south wall—he saw some of Mithrim’s women pulling cattails from the edge of the lake.

He knew them. He shuddered.

He didn’t want to see women. Mithrim’s women; any women. The newcomers who were women were variegated like the bands of Utah Territory desert. A native with hair braided like Fingon’s, a half-formed and hideous creature, his two cousins, a rangy child. True, Aredhel was not disgusting to him, but he needed to hide from her, and hiding more than anything else brought him back to the sunny kitchen and the bent curve of his mother’s neck. He used to watch that curve, when she was busy with her baking or her other work. The exact angle of it told him what safety was. He had only to guess, correctly, how long she would be distracted while he tiptoed by her, seeking some victory he didn’t remember, now.

Yes, Curufin was finished with women. An hour left of light. He blinked at the pale sun. He retreated. It mattered keenly, by the very metric of blades, that the retreat was not the same as a lost victory.

From afar, he could see that Turgon was nosing about in the dusk. He recognized him because it was not yet full dark, and because Turgon had that pinched, Fingolfian stance when he stood still.

Down by the wall, he was, standing still. By Athair’s wall.

Curufin thought it strange that they should have chosen _Turgon_ as their spy. He was a lout, had always had his nose in a book or paper, though his was the kind of mind that reading could not improve. There was nothing about Turgon that suggested a love of stories. Since he had outgrown boyhood (by Curufin, at least, the band on his left hand had not gone unnoticed, inexplicable though it was), he was a boorishly dangerous man. Men like Turgon was becoming would nibble around the rind of the world and then spit it out bit by bit, describing their carnage as _understanding_.

“Looking for the outhouse?” Curufin asked, creeping behind him. He had looped around the stables to make his approach, after deciding on it.

“Lord!” cried Turgon, startled into a blasphemy, satisfying to hear from a starched cousin’s lips. “No, I’m not. I’m…” He toed a foundation-stone with his boot, eyes narrowed. “I say. This seems an oversight.”

Curufin prickled at once. What else could he do? He never visited his father’s grave; he lived, whenever possible, in the places that felt like his father’s home. The wall was neither, but it had been touched by Feanor’s thought and Feanor’s hands.

“An _oversight_?”

Turgon tilted his head. “You’ve never been attacked here.”

“We always did the attacking,” Curufin said, showing his teeth.

“Well, don’t you think someone might come and try?”

He dreamt of it. He dreamed, waking. But he didn’t want to imagine faceless hordes crossing Athair’s bridge. He just wanted…he wanted to see Athair. It was very simple, for all that it was his world.

“Pray tell,” he said finally, with the superior mouth and eyebrows that had always gifted Athair with his most poignant expressions of disdain, “What fear you harbor, and what this wall has done to stoke it.”

“It’s not a proper barricade.”

“I know that. We have other means of protection. Visible and invisible.”

Turgon huffed. “Why not have _this_ means, too? True, you can guard the bridge, but men could shoot easily across its span, then ford the river if they had to. Best to make them climb a hill and have your horses protected. Horses and smithy and such. Seems whoever began this had the same idea. It’s neat work.”

“So very sure, are you?” Curufin returned, with a vicious grin. Turgon had wandered all around Mithrim, it seemed. “So very sure of how we can be safe here, because the alternative terrifies you to your core. Leave me alone, Turgon. I am not the keeper of your ghosts.”

His cousin’s fist rose and fell. In that instant it did not belong to Turgon. It belonged to Curufin. The choice.

 _He wanted to strike me_ , Curufin realized, when the choice was made, and the fist had been tucked back into a coat pocket. _He wanted to strike me._ It was a good, sick feeling. The warmth of blood running down his chin, like it would have done if the blow struck home. Maedhros had never been one to strike him, either. Celegorm threw his body equally behind his love, his hatred, his rage. Maedhros held back, and so did Fingolfin’s line—save for Fingon, but Fingon was, of course, a fool.

 _Why?_ Curufin pondered. Why Turgon and Maedhros and the rest? Then he decided it tidily for himself.

Maedhros was unclean, and knew it. Turgon was trying to keep a peace that wasn’t his.

_Coward. Cowards._

He turned on his heel.

That night, alone—for Celegorm drifted in and out, back to the magnetic pull of the sleeping figure in the sickroom—Curufin was on his back counting the points of pain all over his body.

 _The price you pay_ , Athair once told him. _I’ve felt it, too_.

He couldn’t find another explanation, now, for the firefly-quiet assault that came over him like a storm sometimes, and in truth, he hadn’t looked for one. Still, as he lay dreaming with his eyes fanned open and his breath coming quick, quick, he heard his father speak more clearly in his head than he had in some time.

_You shouldn’t let it in._

His skin stung. His scalp prickled. He jolted upright, passing his hands over his forearms, his cheeks and the hollows of his eye sockets, his neck and throat. His father was not here to see him, any longer. That had been the only way they ever knew what was real; the way they counted what had already been made between them. In each other’s eyes, they showed how they joined hard hammers and hot metal, for the good. They understood what would someday be more than their thoughts.

Hurting, Curufin saw himself for the first time from the outside, from the vantage point of the dead. Then his gaze climbed inward, to see with his father’s censure the things he carried.

He had thrown Nora down and let her in. He had crawled out of the mine to look at Maedhros, then split his courage as wood was split with an axe.

In the morning, he visited his brother.

He did not go unarmed. Or rather, he went prepared—knowing that Maedhros was awake, because Caranthir said so to Amras. Knowing that Celegorm was with him. Fingolfin and Fingon too, the great clumsy, buzzing flies. Curufin opened the door without ceremony and stepped inside.

He thought, before anything else, that his brother’s face was very ugly when skullbone-thin.

“Hello, Maedhros,” he said, armed, too, with his father’s wire-strung calm.

“Curufin,” Maedhros said. His greyness extended beyond ragged lips, beyond cheeks that, as well as grey, were yellowed by bruising. The greyness about his whole person consumed the fear and pain that should have leapt like fire when he saw how much Curufin had grown.

 _You are not yourself_.

Curufin shaped those words, but he didn’t say them. He had used words like them to lead Maglor by strings, but Maglor was without much use to him at present.

“I assumed,” he said instead, with a nod and a glance at Celegorm, but no other greeting for anyone in the room, not even Celegorm’s dog, “That you would want to know the status of our security here.”

“Anything you would like to tell me,” Maedhros murmured, “I’ll hear gladly.”

_Because you are him. You are the only thing left that can ever be him._

Fingon made a rude sound. Curufin did not so much as twitch. He talked. He talked and talked, and remembered the desert, remembered the color of sky and sand, remembered when Maedhros’ pain looked like blood and not ashes.

When he left the sickroom, he did not remember a word he said.

The mine was very cool. In winter or in summer, it was almost the same temperature underground, though heat and chill warred in the air above.

Athair once joked that he liked the consistency. “I am a mercurial man,” he said, a palm tapping his brow as it sometimes did when he was moving along the loosest whorls of his swirling genius. “I crave order, but I have to keep that craving secret. It’s a shackle in the wrong hands. In the wrong mind.”

Curufin had smiled, and been quiet. He was privy to something sacred. Something dear.

There _were_ diamonds to be found, in these latter days. Curufin had a small heap of them to his name, but none were inclined to be of great value. They were profoundly flawed. The one that had been stolen was of chief interest, still. But Gothmog, the accursed, had taken it.

Although Curufin often dreamt of murder, he dreamt most often of Gothmog’s death. It would be his to exact; no one else’s. No one else could garnish that right: the right of a son to avenge his father.

He stayed in the mine until his ears stopped humming.

He felt quite strange when he thought about one unavoidable prospect: relearning the sound of Maedhros’ voice.

Supper became a battleground. Fingolfin’s people made friends too quickly. Some of Mithrim’s most ornery barnacles, such as Phillips, seemed outright welcoming. Curufin could not be unconscious, either, of Turgon’s sudden desire to strategize on the subject of _reinforcements_. There was nothing more troublesome than an enemy building the defenses he might one day attack.

“I hate them,” said Curufin to Celegorm. Venting his spleen, yes, but also testing, always testing.

To his relief, Celegorm answered, “Cadaver flies, all.” He did not say who the cadaver was.

“I thought just the same,” Curufin said. “We must be cautious, of course, before we take any opportunity to act.”

“Act?” Celegorm’s brow wrinkled. He looked—he looked like all the wrong faces, when he looked like that.

 _Let it in. You shouldn’t let it in._ He was drawn back, back, back, to sickly childhood, to curious hours, to the worship of old gods.

One old god. Just one.

“No matter,” he said. “Not now.” A test for himself, to retreat from this brink. Yes, he had seen Celegorm for the hammer he was, but he had not—he had not known quite how to make certain that there would be smooth-forming steel, cherry-bright, for the hammer to do its immediate work upon. The machinations of stupid Turgon, the festering poultice-work of Fingon—

He had hoped that, for Celegorm, those would be enough.

He returned to Maedhros’ bedside. Again, he made certain that he would find his brother alert.

“You look well,” he said, lying.

He watched fear flicker and die in Maedhros’ eyes. The greyness had not receded for that flicker. It had somehow spread.

“His hand,” Celegorm mumbled. He was keeping his voice down, no doubt, because Caranthir and Amras were nearby. They were all taking turns sleeping in Athair’s room, save for Maglor, who stayed oftener in the study. “He must have made their lives hell, for them to take his hand.”

“Do you think so?” Curufin’s spine twisted. A serpent in him, even if he only turned his head. “Hands have so many meanings, you know. _Right hand of the father._ They knew he was the eldest. Maybe it was only that.”

“So—” Celegorm choked. “All that for—” And Celegorm hadn’t said, _wouldn’t_ say, what he’d seen of Maedhros’ body. Only his wild eyes and his white-lipped mouth, at moments when he should have been at ease, made Curufin certain that he had seen more, much more, than Curufin had.

It was the woman’s scar all over again.

Almost a week, and he broke his vow. Thought of _her_ again. Not the dead, black-wrapped corpse with the bloodied smile, but the woman who had joined her eager, bony flesh with his.

Curufin _tried_ to catch himself, invisible fingers closing on a still more invisible soul. Fingers. Hands. _Right-hand-of-the—_

“I just mean,” he said, “That we cannot know. We cannot know much of _anything_ , Celegorm. Not until Maedhros _tells_ us.”

Celegorm left. Caranthir and Amras were no company, after him.

“You missed me, did you?” Nora said, kissing his mouth and prickling throat too wetly. “You needn’t. I am near…so very… _very_ near.”

She had no place in his history. She had no place with him. Everything he wanted to know, to live, was bound up in stone, in force, and in the deep, unchanging places in the earth. It was threat and absolution. Shackles, in the wrong minds.

He clawed at her. He was close, close, close to need.

(Not Curufin’s need.)


End file.
